Re: Great SWT Program
On Nov 21, 12:26 pm, twerpina...@gmail.com wrote:
On Nov 19, 5:57 am, b...@pvv.ntnu.no (Bent C Dalager) wrote:
So don't use DOS (or whatever it's called these days). It was never
meant to be a powerful CLI the way Unix shells are.
You say this like there's an alternative that wouldn't mean a massive
migration of my data, risk of data loss, loss of the use of many of
the games and other software I've installed over the years, and so on
and so forth, plus sacrificing some interoperability with most of the
computers in use around the world. :P
Pardon?
Windows PowerShell is a much more capable shell that is shipped as
part of Windows 2008 Server; it's also available separately from
Microsoft for XP, Vista, and Windows 2003 Server:
<http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/
powershell/download.mspx>
Or, if POSIX is your thing, there are native versions of bash, tcsh,
ksh, zsh, and various others for Windows. Or you can use python as a
shell, like some of the Windows people here do. Or ruby; I hear it
works rather well for that.
You don't have to switch to another OS to replace cmd.exe with
something useful.
But how would you go about converting them all from .gif to .pdf?
Why in God's name would you want to? Now, if I wanted to convert them
all from .gif to .png, I'd find an image conversion tool of some sort
and mass-select the gifs, then drop them on the conversion tool and
tell it what to do with them.
This relies on every single tool you might want to use in a batch
context being aware of two things:
1. Drag-and-drop.
2. Batch operations.
Behaving like a drop target correctly is non-trivial to implement even
when the only acceptable drop source is a file, particularly on
Windows. It's somewhat easier on OS X if the application happens to
use the Cocoa document framework, but then you'd get each image
opened, not added to a batch operation (and the former is the
"expected" behaviour on OS X anyways).
(It's worth noting that dragging a group of files onto a program's
icon in Windows constructs a command line with all those files' paths
and runs it, too. You can hit the command line length limit this way
pretty easily. On the other hand, selecting a group of files and
double-clicking one of them runs each file's default shell verb, hence
the behaviour Twisted described of creating 80 separate Notepad
windows. Consistency? What's that?)
On the batch side of the fence, even tools designed to work with a
single input file and a single output file can be scripted using any
of the usual UNIX shells, provided the input and output files can be
specified on the command line. Putting the batch-ness in the shell
also lets the shell developers, who are good at it, focus
monomaniacally on making it the best batch operation tool they can
while freeing up the image manipulation tool developers, who are good
at image processing, to focus on image manipulation, not propeller-
headed options like batch processing.